My wife just closed the books on our mid year numbers (January – June) and I’m proud to say that year over year profits are up in the double digits yet again. Running the store these last 6 months was much harder for a variety of reasons which I’ll outline below. But what’s remarkable about this year’s gains is that my wife and I have barely touched the business. Essentially, the business has grown all by itself through word of mouth and without our intervention.

Normally, I wouldn’t be proud to say that we did “nothing”, but this past year was all about survival. Late last year, our second child was born and we also had this crazy notion that moving to a bigger house at the same time was a good idea.

In fact, there was this short period last December in which our timeline was absolutely insane. In the span of just one week, I went to my brother’s wedding, had my second child, went to a funeral, closed on our new house and then had to pack for the move.

Did I mention that we moved the business as well? Basically, the first half of the year was just about getting by. Now that my son is sleeping through the night and we’ve moved him out of our bedroom, we’re ready to kick some butt yet again.

The Numbers

Below are some highlights of the year.

• Year over year revenue grew 24%
• Year over year profit grew 26%
• We had 4 consecutive months with higher revenues and profit than last year’s highest month.
• Our margins grew 2%
• Our average order size increased by $2 per order
• Website traffic increased by about 22%

Overall, the numbers weren’t too shabby. One other thing to note is that we started contracting out the embroidery portion of our business which reduced our margins a little bit but we still managed to eek out a 2% gain over last year. Not bad.

What Are The Plans For This Year?

For our online store, this year is going to be about scaling. We are going to put in place processes and document our day to day activities so we can find someone to manage the place in our absence. I want to be able to go on vacation without stressing out about our customer service or worrying about our quality control.

Since this means adding more people, I wouldn’t be surprised if our profits go down the latter half of this year and into the beginning of next year. But that’s okay. Not being involved in the day to day activities would allow my wife and I to do other things….perhaps we might start something else on the side.

We’re Going To Go For The Top Spot In Google

We basically rank among the top 5 spots in Google for our main keyword phrases but the number one spot gets an order magnitude more clicks and I want that extra traffic! So the latter half of the year will be about getting to the top.

We’re going to pull out all the stops and perhaps even hire some freelance writers on the side. The top competitor in our niche has a lot of backlinks but their numbers have been stagnant for some time. If they stay complacent, I think we can overtake them within 6-8 months.

Talk Is Cheap

In any case, I’ll do another recap at the end of the year to follow up on our progress. Now that I’m getting 8 hours of sleep again, I feel like I’m ready to take on anything. In other news, I’ve also been quietly working on my course on how to start and run an online store. Looking forward to launching this baby sometime later this year or early next year.

Embarassing as it was for me to write my last article on how I was a neurotic mess when our business first launched, there were several points that I wanted to emphasize…

• There is always a struggle and a period of uncertainty with every business until you make it over the hump. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it. If you hear a story that sounds too easy, chances are that it’s a sales pitch.
• Some amount of neurosis or craziness is required with every business because it’s an indication that you have the necessary passion. The key is to channel that energy to the right place.
• Sometimes you have to do whatever is necessary to get the job done even if it means sucking up your pride.
• Someone needs to take one for the team. If my embarassing stories make you feel better about your own business then I’ve done my job. I tell it like it is.

Of course, all of that startup neurosis has to end at some point, otherwise you’ll eventually drive yourself and your business partners crazy. I happen to be spending the rest of my life with my business partner so it was important for us to have a high level plan for success even from the very start. So how did my wife and I get over the hump?

We Didn’t Focus On Traffic In The Beginning

The title of this section might seem counterintuitive. After all, website traffic is the key to success for any online business. However in the back of mind, I always had faith that the web traffic would eventually come. Perhaps I had watched Field Of Dreams one too many times but I had confidence that with enough content, the visitors would eventually find us either via the search engines or through word of mouth.

So one of the keys to getting over the hump was going into our business with the proper expectations early on. Business was going to start out slow and I knew that it was going to be slow for quite some time.

But one of the things I told myself was that I absolutely would not tolerate a high rate of shopping cart abandonment. If a customer was going to find us, I wanted to make sure that there was a high probability that they were going to make a purchase. That is why I was so focused on stalking our customers early on. I wanted to know where they got stuck and where they left our store. I called them on the phone to find out why they weren’t completing their transactions. I desperately wanted to know what was going on in their minds when they didn’t make a purchase.

We Used Adwords To Tune Our Conversion Rate

One of the best ways to test out the conversion effectiveness of your website is through Adwords. Because Adwords sends you direct traffic for people actually looking to buy products matching your keywords, they are ideal test subjects to iron out any conversion issues with your online store.

So early on we used very targeted, narrowly matching keywords and phrases to drive specific customers to our site with Adwords. And since traffic was pretty much nonexistent for our site outside of Adwords, we knew that almost everyone who arrived at our site was specifically looking for the items that we carried in our store.

Having targeted customers at your online store is great because if they don’t make a purchase at a high percentage, it usually means it’s your fault. After all, if you can’t convert customers who are actively looking to buy, then your site has problems that need to be fixed.

After a long period of stalking, calling and doing exit rate analysis, we got our store to the point where we were satisfied with our conversion rate. If a customer was going to step into our online store, we had a pretty good chance of making a sale.

We Focused On Content

Once our conversion rate was stable, we then focused on long term traffic. If you’ve read some of my case studies, then I’m probably starting to sound like a broken record. The key to long term sustainable traffic is content. And by content, I don’t just mean any content, I mean content that people actually want to read as opposed to a bunch of verbiage that repeats your site’s keywords.

Our long term strategy was providing content that showed customers how to make various fun projects using our products as raw materials. By attracting people to our site through our content, customers were more likely to buy because they could easily purchase the things they were reading about without leaving the site.

Around the six month mark or so, our content strategy started paying dividends and we noticed a rise in the number of people arriving at our site through our content pages to make a purchase.

We Targeted Volume Customers In Our Niche

Selling one off products to individual customers is all fine and good but my wife and I knew that if we wanted to supplant her income within a year, we needed some big ticket customers as well. So we made an active effort to target the biggest and most consistent buyers in our niche, the wedding and event planners.

If we could land consistent business from customers who would buy large quantities from us and refer us to other customers, we were set. Today, we get a good chunk of consistent business from event planners, wedding planners, hotels, restaurants and even private airlines. In fact, our general consumer vs bulk purchasing numbers are pretty balanced and the two together make up a very powerful revenue generating combo.

How Did We Get Over The Hump?

To sum it all up, we got over the hump by initially focusing our energies on conversion rate before moving on. Getting all of the web traffic in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t complete the sale. Then, we put in place a long and a short term strategy for sales.

In the short term, we used adwords and focused on event planners for immediate traffic and sales. We also marketed on the wedding forums as well. For the long term, we focused on content to drive organic traffic based on search. When things got tough and we wanted to give up, thoughts of spending more time with the family kept us going.

All of these things allowed us to make over 100K in profits in a little over a year of business and we’ve grown in the double and even triple digits ever since.

Whenever you read about an entrepreneur who has a made a large sum of money in a short period of time, there is always this misconception that their path to success was quick and smooth.

Photo By Derek Miller

Take John Chow for example. If you read his blog and his tips, it seems as though he can make tens of thousands of dollars per day by barely lifting a finger. What you never hear about though is the pain and hardship he went through to get to this point.

The fact is that once your online business is up and running, life does get easier and we tend to forget about the early stage pain. Looking back at our online wedding linens business, there were several times when I was a neurotic mess and I did a lot of stupid things. (Notice the use of the word “I”. My wife was usually more level headed and patient).

Some of the more often questions I get asked are, “Was business slow early on?”, “Was there any point in which you didn’t think things would work?”, “Was there any point that you got frustrated and wanted to quit?”. If you were planning on asking me any of these questions, I’ll just save you the time right now and say “YES!!” as loudly as I can type. In fact, there were many stupid things I did early on which I will share below.

My Moods Were Dictated By Sales

After the many weekends and late nights spent launching our business, I wanted to see results right away. In fact, I wanted sales so badly that I became obsessed with every customer that visited our site. One of the coolest and biggest time sucking features of our shopping cart is that you can follow a customer as they browse your store. What product are they looking at? Are they in checkout? What do they have in their shopping cart? You have all of this information at the click of your finger.

Early on when things were slow, I used to stalk our customers and my mood would be dictated by their actions.

Me: Come on baby! That’s right…Put something in your shopping cart. You want those linen napkins. I know you do. They’ll look great on your dining room table.
Wife: Will you stop stalking our customers already? It’s just going to get you all worked up.
Me: Nonsense! Oh!!! They put something in their cart!!! I think they might buy something! C’mon baby. Buy it!! Buy it!!
Wife: **Sigh**
Me: Sweet! They are entering in their information!!!! Just a little further… C’mon, click on ’submit’. you can do it. It’s the big purple button on the lower right. Wait….what’s going on? They’ve been stuck on the payment page now for over 5 minutes…What’s wrong?!? Mayday!! Mayday!! Why would they leave without paying for their merchandise. Crap!!! Is it something we did?….Is their something wrong with our store? It’s game over man…Game over!!(I would go on like this for several minutes)
Wife: I think you need to get a life….
Me: You are my life dear….and we just lost another customer.

Whenever we did successfully sell something, I would be on Cloud 9 for the entire day. But when customers abandoned their cart, I’d be left with this empty feeling of despair. This roller coaster of emotions wasn’t healthy for my psyche.

Taking Things A Step Further

It’s one thing to passively observe the behavior of your customers online, but I desperately wanted and needed feedback in order to improve our store. Why did customers not complete checkout? Why did customers leave the store so quickly? I wanted to know.

Unfortunately, when you just launch your business and people aren’t buying, feedback can be hard to obtain. Which brings me to neurotic action number 2… Sometimes after a customer had abandoned their shopping cart, I would call them directly and ask why. As you can imagine, some customers were shocked by the call and some of these conversations were downright uncomfortable.

Me: Our records indicate that you attempted checkout and your order didn’t go through properly. Do you require any assistance to complete your order?
Customer: Huh? Who is this?
Me: I’m sorry. You were trying to purchase some wedding handkerchiefs from our online store about 15 minutes ago.
Customer: That’s strange, I don’t remember buying anything. I was just looking around. How did you did get my number?
Me: (You entered it when you left your unpurchased items littered all over our online store!***This is I wanted to say***) Oh okay. Was there a particular reason that you did not complete your purchase?
Customer: **pause**. No reason…I was just looking around. What is it you want again? Please don’t call again.

In my defense, even though I drove away a bunch of customers early on, I actually did get some quality feedback. For example, one time a customer told me that there was a bug with our credit card processor and the use of his debit card. Another customer I called told me that our pictures were too small to make out the product details. I also discovered that many customers went through checkout just to find out the shipping costs because it wasn’t obvious what the final total was. I was even commended once for good customer service! Even still, getting called by a store right after you decide not to buy is not a wise thing to do…

Changing Too Fast

Whenever I did receive any sort of feedback, I acted on it fast. And as a result, our online store was in a constant state of flux. I never gave any of my changes anytime to digest. Instead, it was like “Customer X couldn’t find the Checkout button very easily. Perhaps I should make it twice the size and move it to the left”. “Customer Y thought she needed an account to buy something. Perhaps I should re-implement the checkout process”.

What ended up happening was that I was constantly making tweaks without observing the impacts of each change. It was counter productive and stressful as well because I worked at such a quick pace that I often made mistakes. Probably the most egregious mistake I made was when a syntax error caused a picture to not load properly on one of our checkout pages. Customers trying to make a purchase were greeted with a big red X where one of the photos should have been.

We All Have To Go Through It

The next time you read about someone making it big or making lots of money in a short period of time, realize that they had to work hard to get where they are today. We all have our neurotic moments that we’d rather not share. We are all not as confident as we appear to be. The scary thing is that I’ve barely scratched the surface with my mistakes. The fact is that there aren’t any true shortcuts. Things will come along gradually as long as you constantly try to improve.

Over the past several years, our online wedding linens store website has undergone 3 major revisions. In the beginning, I was lazy, didn’t know what I was doing, and launched the store with more or less the stock OSCommerce shopping cart layout. After several months of very few sales, I decided to redesign the entire site to make it more aesthetically pleasing. Finally during the 3rd revision, I redesigned the site based on customer behavior to maximize conversions and sales. Here are a few things I learned from all of these changes.

Photo By The Fox And The Polar Bear

Don’t Use The Stock Template

I repeat, do not use the stock, out of the box template for any shopping cart or website package that you choose to use, because it will suck. You might think that the engineers designing the software did so with an optimal layout in mind. But remember, they are engineers and not marketers! In the beginning, I was so eager to launch our online store and start earning money that I didn’t want to spend time designing and optimizing my website. Big mistake!

The truth is that there’s no such thing as an optimal out of the box layout. Your website is unique and you will need to make tweaks according to your customer base and traffic patterns. Everywhere I look, I still see many online stores using out of the box templates and they all blend in. If you take the time to differentiate your store, you will sell more product. Don’t be lazy.

Make The Testimonials Stand Out

Especially when you are just starting out as a no name store, every customer is going to be wary of purchasing from you. Are you a real store? Are you reliable? Do you have happy customers? You need to make new customers feel comfortable enough to purchase from you and that means more than just displaying a few security badges around your site.

When I redesigned the site, I added testimonials to our banner header right smack on the top of every single page of the online store. In addition, I created a big box to emphasize our customer service in the middle of the front page. By displaying our testimonials more prominently, our shopping cart abandonment rate dropped dramatically. At first I didn’t think that people cared, but even today our testimonials link is among the highest clicked link on the front page of our online store.

Make An Appealing Checkout Page

Once a upon a time, we were losing 30% of our customers at the first step of the checkout process. When I say first step, I’m not even talking about the page where you enter in your address and payment information. I’m referring to the page in which customers choose whether to check out without an account, create a new account or login to an existing account.


Once I changed the layout from the upper left format to that of the upper right above, the exit rate from this page decreased by about 25%.

Create A Bestsellers Page

I used to be under the impression that most customers find the products they want to buy by using our in store search or by browsing our product categories. But much to my surprise, customers are much more likely to find the product they want to buy from our bestsellers page. In fact, the bestsellers link on our front page is by far the most clicked product link on the site.

The only thing I can conclude from this is that customers don’t always know what they want to buy. As a shop owner, you have to steer customers towards products you want to move and provide them with social proof that these products are popular. For our store, customers who add items to their shopping cart from the bestsellers page are much more likely to complete their purchase.

As part of my 3rd redesign, I moved the bestsellers link all the way to the top of the products category and made a special button for it so it wouldn’t be missed.

Flaunt Your Press Page

If you are getting media love for your online store or business, make sure you let everyone know about it. At first, when we were mentioned in Brides and Real Simple magazine, I only had a single text link on the front page of our online store. Probably no one saw it because it blended in with the rest of the text.

When I did the 3rd redesign, I made sure to put a picture of the cover of the magazine on the left hand sidebar so it would be displayed on every single page of the entire site. When customers see the “As Seen on Brides Magazine” along with the cover, they know that we’re a legit business and are more inclined to buy from us. The other thing that I did was to create a special press page to display all of the publications that our store has been featured in.

People Rarely Click On Stuff On The Right Sidebar

For the first few iterations of the store, we ran a website with a standard 3 column layout. I wanted to be able to display product and navigation links on the left and show sale items and bestsellers on the right. But after looking at the site overlays using Analytics, I discovered that hardly anyone ever clicked on the links on the right sidebar.

As it turns out, our customers gravitate towards the left when navigating through the store. So during one of the redesigns, I removed the 3rd column altogether and added buttons to specific products pages that I wanted customers to focus on. In the end, customers were much more likely to click on these buttons rather than the links on the right sidebar.

The best way to get the customers attention for any product you want to move is to show a big picture right smack in the center of the page. We now have 2 fairly large product photos on the frontpage that we change from time to time depending on what we want to sell.

Summing It Up

These are just some of the major things I learned while redesigning our store. There are so many more tweaks that I’ve done these past years that I’ve either forgotten about or are too small to mention. In any case, the key to making any website optimization is to try new things and take down accurate data. Nothing is permanent so I’m positive that there will be another redesign at some point in the future for both this blog and our online store.

Happy New Year! My wife just closed the books on another year of business and we are proud to announce that we have achieved double digit growth yet again. The profits for our business increased by 41% and we’re really happy with our accomplishments despite the down economy.

Most people consider 41% a pretty good increase in business so why the “only” in the title? The reason is because our profits could’ve been much much higher had certain fortunate and unfortunate events not transpired during the latter half of the year. If you recall, I posted a mid year update back in July and profits were up 75% at that point in time. Since our sales are usually heavily weighted towards the holiday season at the end of the year, we initially projected our profit numbers to be a lot higher than they were.

Before I go into detail about why our profits sagged towards the end of the year, let’s go over some of the highlights first.

• Year over year profit growth was 41%. There are three main reasons for this increase. One, we introduced many more high margin personalized items to our product mix. Two, we raised prices on some of our most popular goods. And three, we simply sold more product
• Year over year revenue growth was 38%
• The traffic to our online store increased by 66%. This boost in traffic was largely attributed to many of our content pages getting indexed on the front page of Google.
• The organic conversion rate increased by roughly 7%
• Our margins increased by roughly 3%

All said, it was a pretty good year but it definitely could’ve been better. Now let’s talk about why the second half of the year wasn’t so hot.

We Had A Family Emergency

My father passed away in late July, so my wife and I had to close up the store for about a month and a half to fly back east. Even though we were closed, we still accepted orders but order volume dropped considerably as expected. There were very few customers willing to wait a month and a half before receiving their products in the mail.

It’s unfortunate, but the reality is that our business is still largely dependent on my wife and I. We have a few people that we pay to help us pack and ship product but there’s no way that they could have run our business by themselves. In any case, the latter half of July and August were pretty bad. We basically pulled in only a small fraction of our usual revenues.

Our Son Kyle Was Born

December is usually one of the busiest months of the year for our business. Christmas and other holiday shoppers stock up on our personalized items as gifts and many event planners purchase large quantities of our linen napkins for holiday parties.

Our son was supposed to be born on December 8th, so my wife and I decided to play it safe and shut down the store starting in the beginning of December. We closed up shop a bit early because we wanted to avoid going into labor with a bunch of pending orders in the queue that needed to be shipped.

Initially, my wife and I thought that we could reopen our store as soon as Kyle was born but this turned out to be the most ridiculous assumption ever. I must admit that I completely forgot what it was like to take care of a newborn child. I forgot about the sleepless nights, the endless crying and fussiness, the headaches and the general lack of rest.

Basically, my wife and I were walking zombies from day to day and there was no way in hell we could run the store in our current mental state. In addition, MyWifeQuitHerJob.com began to suffer as well. It’s hard enough to write as it is but when you throw in 3 hours of sleep a night into the equation, it’s downright impossible.

We Had To Move Into Our New House

To make things even worse, we also purchased a brand new house which was destined to close escrow on December 10th. It would’ve been all fine and good if the house was move in ready, but we wanted to make a few changes to the house which meant that I had to manage and deal with contractors shortly after Kyle was born. In addition, my wife and I had to also worry about packing our possessions in preparation for the move.

Thank goodness my mom flew over in order to help us out. If she wasn’t around, my wife and I probably would have died of exhaustion. In any case, the birth of our child coupled with the new house caused our store to be closed for practically the entire month of December, our most profitable month of the year.

You take away 2.5 months of revenue including one of our busiest months of the year and we were really lucky to scrape by with a 41% year over year increase in profit. This coming year, my wife and I hope to make our online store more autonomous. If we can manage to find someone responsible enough to run our store in our absence, we can avoid having these prolonged shutdowns. Here’s to a profitable new year!

Whenever I mention to anyone that I work a full time job, help my wife run our online store and maintain MyWifeQuitHerJob.com all while having two kids in the house, one of the first questions I always get is how I find the time to do all of these things.

Photo by Morbuto

Believe it or not, even with all of these items on my plate, I still feel I have time to take on even more. The secret is being more efficient with your time and managing your day a little bit better. I know. It’s easier said than done. But I’m going to describe in this article how my wife and I organize our time to run our online business and and how we manage to cram a ton of activities into a single day. The reality is that there’s plenty of free time lying around. You just have to learn how to extract every last minute.

The Time Granularity Problem

One of the biggest hurdles to the launch of our online business was that there were too many gargantuan tasks to accomplish. We had to launch our website. We had to write product descriptions. We had to market our store. We had to establish relationships with vendors. We had to establish internal processes.

What ended up happening early on was that we became overwhelmed by these large tasks because each one of them took too many man hours to complete in a single sitting. As a result, even if we had a 1 hour block free, we put off working on our online store because we didn’t think that we could get any meaningful work done in such a small amount of time. We kept telling ourselves that we would start when a large enough time slot was available but it never ever materialized.

The reality is that most of us don’t have huge blocks of time to devote to any given project. Especially if you have a full time job or children running around the house, you often only have small .5-1 hour chunks of free time available. And more often than not, these valuable time slots are wasted away with the belief that nothing can get accomplished in such a brief moment of time.

Breaking The Problem Down

Looking back, much of our success was the result of making efficient use of these small time slots. In order to manage our time more effectively, my wife and I broke our large tasks down into small pieces that could be completed in a single sitting. We ended up dividing our business tasks into half hour time slots. So if we had a spare 30 minutes, we could easily switch gears and cross one of these tasks off the list.

While some tasks took longer than a half hour, no single task exceeded more than a couple hours long. For example, for our website, one of our tasks was to enter in 10 product descriptions into the shopping cart database. Another task was to take 10 product photos. On the product sourcing side, an example task was to contact a short list of vendors or locate a small subset of products that we wanted to sell. Each and every line item was something that we could do quickly and efficiently even in the shortest of time slots.

By crossing these things off the list, we felt like we were always making progress which fueled us to work even faster because we saw light at the end of the tunnel. What also ended up happening was that we worked more often on the business because the tiny size of each task lured us into working longer and harder. Each task seemed so small and easy that we always felt as though we could hammer out another one in no time flat.

Find A Pace You Are Comfortable And Maintain It

Early on, my wife and I also made time for the business by making sacrifices. Not only did we stop watching television but we also drastically cut down on our sleeping time as well. On some days, I would arrive at my day job a walking zombie.

Making healthy sacrifices is fine, but I gradually learned to never make sacrifices at the expense of my health. My main problem is that I like to tackle everything in a single sitting. When I’m excited about something, I’m all too eager to try and get things done in a timely manner even if it means pulling all nighters. But with a business, I discovered that the list of tasks is endless and it’s impossible to just cram through it. You might be able to get through a week of little sleep, but things will eventually catch up to you and you may well burn yourself out.

The strategy I ended up finding far more effective was picking a comfortable, maintainable pace and sticking with it even if the slow pace felt like torture. To find out what pace is right for you, simply ask yourself the following questions. How many hours can you comfortably devote to the business per day for months or even years on end? Can you maintain this frequency easily without impacting your mental well being? It might take a short adjustment period but eventually you’ll discover your sweet spot.

Set A Schedule

Once you’ve made some progress on your business, it’s important to maintain your momentum. And the best way to do so is to establish a routine. Set aside a specific time or day that you can devote solely to the business.

For example, my wife reserve and still set aside Sunday afternoons for business related activities. Not only does this prevent our business from stagnating but it also makes working on our online store involuntary. It’s almost like we’re on autopilot!

Don’t Lie To Yourself

The moral of the story is that time is always available so stop making excuses! No matter what, you can always squeeze out a small block of time even if your schedule seems packed from day to day. By creating tasks that can be accomplished in small chunks, you can make better use of random time slots and consistently make progress. Good luck!

As the due date for our second child rapidly approaches, my wife and I are battening down the hatches for the impending damage to our finances, rest and well being. As I mentioned in a previous post, we are in the midst of purchasing a brand new house. In addition, we’ve also decided to go ahead and purchase a mini-van to help transport the kids around.

What! A minivan?!? I’ve been getting a lot of flack lately from my friends making fun of me for wanting to purchase a minivan, but you know what? When I’m cruising in the parking lot with an arm full of groceries in one hand, pushing a stroller and carrying a baby in a sling, I’ll have the last laugh when all I have to do is hit one button to open up all of the doors. Honestly, I can’t really see any reason not to get a minivan if you have more than one child. Everyone should suck it up and just get one. The convenience is worth it.

In any case, both the house, the car and the new child are going to put a severe strain on our finances and more importantly our mental health. That’s not even mentioning the fact that we’ll still have a business to run and a blog to maintain as well.

Cutting Back

The first thing we have to do is to cut back on our spending. I was looking at Quicken the other day and discovered that we spend over 700 dollars a month on going out to eat. What!?!? I couldn’t really believe it until I looked at the itemized spending report. Our average meal cost about 26 dollars which meant that we were going out to eat roughly 6.7 times a week. That’s almost once a day!

It’s probably irrelevant anyways since we won’t be going out to eat for a very long time due to our second child, but we’re going to try and drastically cut back on restaurant food. Since my wife and I can’t really cook that well, we’re going to revert back to our tried and true strategy of buying take out Chinese food, purchasing the exact same ingredients and stir frying it all together to create one large vat of food that we can eat for weeks.

We also are going to cut back on entertainment expenses, an amount that totaled about 350 dollars last month. This shouldn’t be too hard either since we’ll be dealing with a newborn that needs to eat sleep and poop every 3 hours.

The Business

My job is going to be easy. I get to escape into the peace and quiet of my office at work for 8 hours day. It’s just going to be me, my coworkers and my dual 21 inch LCD displays. My wife on the other hand is going to have one heck of a time handling the day to day operations of our online wedding linens business while taking care of two kids. Clearly doing both things is not humanly possible even for a super woman like my wife so we’re going to get some help.

Namely, we’re going to hire a mother’s helper to help out with the kids. I had no idea that such a position existed but since my wife is going to be physically around the house, it’s generally much cheaper to hire a mother’s helper as opposed to a full time nanny. That way, my wife can concentrate on the business while spending her free moments playing with the kids (and feeding them as well).

We’re also looking into hiring an answering service for the business. I didn’t know that these services existed either but for a reasonable fee, a team of telephone operators will answer calls and take orders on behalf of your business. You have to train the operators to conduct themselves how you would like them to act on the phone. But in theory once they are trained, they can take over your customer support calls as well.

Using such a service actually sounds a little too good to be true and my wife and I are a little sketched out by these answering services since they will be the face of our business over the phone. But we are willing to at least give them a shot and I’ll let you know how things go.

The Blog

Finally in terms of this blog, I will continue to do my best to maintain my 2-3 post a week posting frequency. Granted I’ll be living on 3-4 hours of sleep a night and I may no longer blog in complete sentences, but I’m going to make a commitment to continue writing.

If anyone has the desire to guest post for this blog, drop me an email and I’ll take a look at your entry. December is going to be a rough month for my wife and I. We have to move into our new house, deliver a baby, attend a funeral and attend my brothers wedding all in the span of 2 weeks.

In any case, I’m not complaining. I can’t wait to get settled in my new house with my entire family. After all, this is what we’ve been working hard to achieve.

Several of my friends and acquaintances that follow MyWifeQuitHerJob.com find it hard to believe that our online wedding linens business can possibly make 100 thousand dollars a year in profits for selling to such a tiny niche. And they are correct. We don’t make 100K a year. We make much more than that now that our business has expanded and we are more established.

Photo by Borman818

While a six figure profit number might seem like a lot of money at first, getting to 100K a year is actually not an insurmountable task when you look at the number in smaller, more manageable pieces.

In fact, my wife and I initially chose 100K to be our profit goal for the first year because we felt that it was a number we could actually hit. That, and 100K per year was roughly the salary that my wife left behind when she quit her day job.

The key when trying to achieve any large goal is to sit down and break the problem down into smaller chunks and assign a monetary strategy to each piece. Breaking a large problem down helps for two reasons. One, seeing a smaller problem will provide you with the confidence to succeed. Two, dealing with smaller pieces will allow you to make consistent progress. For my wife and I, we broke the 100K number down to a series of daily monetary goals and managed to meet our initial profit target in a little over a year.

Dissecting Six Figures

At the heart of it all, making 100K a year means that you need to make approximately $8333 a month. Assuming 30 days in a month, that means you only have to make roughly $278 dollars a day in order to hit the magical six figures mark.

How achievable making $278 per day is will depend on your average profit per transaction. After doing some back of the envelope calculations and some initial trial sales on Ebay, my wife and I estimated that our average profit per sale for our online wedding linens store would be roughly 50 dollars which meant that we only needed to complete 6 orders a day to reach 100K. Thinking about it this way, 278 dollars a day didn’t sound like a scary number at all.

So with this goal in mind, my wife and I devised ways to hit 6 orders a day as quickly and as easily as possible.

Forum Marketing

The first thing that came to mind was that I could infiltrate and immerse myself in some of the wedding based forums out there. Thousands of would be brides congregate at places like the wedding channel and the knot forums. If I could take the time and ingrain myself within the community, I could drum up some consistent business by pitching our products directly to our target audience.

After getting banned several times from these wedding forums, I finally got the hang of it and discovered that I needed to be more clever when marketing on the forums because the system administrators did not tolerate any sort of self promotion.

I found that by being genuine and helpful to these would be brides, I could occasionally slip a few subtle recommendations and not make it seem like an outright sales pitch for our online business.

Early on, we used this tactic extensively to drum up a few orders a day and establish some word of mouth.

We Used Adwords

If you are starting a website from complete scratch, it can take a good amount of time to get indexed into the search engines. And what happens more often than not is that your website will sit in the Google sandbox for an extended period before it is released to the general index.

Fortunately if you have the budget, you can buy extremely targeted clicks directly from Google using AdWords. Using a fairly intuitive interface, you can create a simple online advertisement in under 10 minutes and have it show up immediately in the search engines.

Looking back, most of our early business came from Adwords. I also remember that in the beginning, we actually spent more on Adwords than we were making in revenues. But gradually over time, we managed to filter out the non profitable keywords from our account and soon we were turning a massive profit from Adwords advertising alone.

Adwords works! It really does. In fact, I think that during our first year when our adwords budget was pretty low, we still managed to make about 4 sales day which cost us roughly 5 bucks per conversion.

We Solicited Testimonials

Once we got prospective customers on our website, it was crucial to have them feel confident shopping at our store. So early on, we gave free product away to our friends and acquaintances and had them provide us with their reviews. In addition, we also sold some of our hankies on Ebay and used the Ebay feedback as testimonials as well. By placing our testimonials prominently on the front page for everyone to see, it made our prospective customers confident that we could deliver quality product on time.

The combination of having a clean looking website and great testimonials along with decent amounts of adwords and wedding forum traffic, we managed to well exceed our 6 order a day quota to make 100K during our first year of business.

We Targeted Wedding Planners

The final boost to our revenues that allowed us to hit 100K was that we gave wedding and event planners special treatment. We went through the internet and contacted these planners directly and offered discounts on bulk purchases of our products.

While this tactic was hit or miss, when we did manage to lock in a wedding planner, it was usually for a large sum of money. In some cases, one order from an event planner exceeded over 5-7x what a typical day’s income would be.

100K Is Within Your Reach

If you take the time to think about it, making 100K a year with your online business is well within your reach. The key is to have a gameplan on how to get there. By breaking down your earnings goal to a daily value, you can plan ahead and figure out how you are going to make your numbers. Using this guideline will also allow you to figure out early on whether your business idea is even viable and whether you need to raise prices as well.

Embrace disaster. When things go wrong and your customer is angry, take advantage of the situation and make things right. Don’t make excuses and take responsibility! After all, the reputation of your online business is defined by how you deal with adversity and unfortunate circumstances rather than how you handle day to day operations.

Photo by Alan Clark Design

Take our online store as an example. 90% of our customers complete their purchase from our online wedding linens store without ever contacting us. And whenever this happens, it’s difficult to make a strong impression. We have not personally interacted with the customer in any way and the point of sale is just another sale. Sure, the customer might like our products and they might mention our business to a few of their friends. But most likely, their purchasing experience just blends in like any other.

The best way to spread positive word of mouth about your online business is by having an interaction with your customer. And the best way to shine with your customers is by dealing with negative situations with a positive attitude.

Go out of your way to fix bad situations even if it isn’t directly your fault. I’m not saying that you should sabotage your business to get customer calls but when disaster strikes, think of it as an opportunity and not a calamity.

The Delivery Screwup

Recently, we had a customer place an order with us about 10 days before her wedding. Because she was having a destination wedding, she needed her order at least 5 days prior in order to catch her flight. To make matters more complicated, her order consisted of a variety of personalized handkerchiefs that required custom embroidery.

Under normal circumstances, we usually ask the customer to allow at least 5 days for any custom items to be created prior to shipment. This made the timeline relatively tight using standard shipping methods. But the customer absolutely did not want to pay extra money for rush delivery(we charge $30). Under the circumstances however, we felt very confident that her order would reach her on time because she lived in the same state and only 60 minutes away.

In any case, we bumped up the priority of her order and managed to ship out her order the following day. Just as a precaution, I personally followed up on the status of her order to make sure that she received it on time. Sure enough, the tracking on her order indicated that it was delivered the following day and well within her deadline.

3 days passed and I thought things were all good until I received a call from this customer. In fact, when I first picked up the phone, I was expecting her to thank me profusely for delivering her order in such a prompt fashion. Instead, I got this…

Customer: You told me that I would receive my order on time but I still haven’t gotten it and now I have a plane to catch! Where is my order?!?!

Me: That’s strange. I tracked the status of your order personally and you should have received it well over 3 days ago.

Customer: Well I haven’t received anything! I need my order by tomorrow morning by 8am!

Me: I apologize. Let me see what happened. Oh man! The tracking on your order says that your package was delivered to the wrong address and was being resent! I swear that just the other day, the tracking page indicated that your order was delivered properly.

Customer: Well clearly, it wasn’t! You do realize that I have a plane to catch right? Can you send me another set ASAP?

Me: I’m sorry ma’am. Even if we had another set of hankies custom embroidered, we would be unable to have them shipped out today. It’s already too late in the day (It was already 6pm).

Decision Time

At this point, I had two options. I could make an excuse and state very clearly that we are not responsible for our delivery carrier’s actions. After all, if this customer wanted to guarantee a specific delivery date, she could have selected “Express Delivery” which we absolutely guarantee.

The other option was to take a loss and go out of our way to rectify the situation. The choice was tough because there was a fair amount of money at stake and I had to make this choice in a little under ten seconds. After all, I couldn’t really handle this situation half ass. I either had to wholeheartedly try and help or turn her away. For me at least, I personally hate it when companies try and weasel their way out of paying only to give in to your demands after you have yelled and fussed.

Ultimately, I choose to help her out. We had her order custom embroidered that night and we shipped out her order directly to her wedding venue via express mail first thing the following morning. And let me tell you, rush shipping is not cheap by any means!

The Aftermath

Ultimately, the customer received her order on time. 2 weeks later, I received the following message.

Steve,

I just wanted to sincerely thank you for your assistance in this matter. You were prompt, helpful and sympathetic while solving the problem immediately.

It is so rare to receive such proactive and efficient customer service. Thank you treating me like a person instead of a number. I will recommend you to everyone I know.

Was It Worth It?

We lost money on this transaction but did it matter? I’m sure that this customer probably told all of her friends or at least her bridal party about her experience with our online business. And I’m 100% positive that whenever any of her friends or acquaintances require wedding linens, she will point them our way.

While it’s difficult to quantify the effect of a good customer service deed, I have to believe that eventually all of the good karma will catch up to us someday. If anything, it sure felt damn good to receive that email from the customer. In fact, I would argue that her testimonial itself was worth every penny.

My wife and I jumped right into our online business with a “whatever it takes” attitude. We were excited. We were enthusiastic. And we were ready to make money by any means necessary even if it meant catering to our customers. Looking back, this was not necessarily the wrong attitude to have. But this no holds barred policy got us into a lot of trouble and wasted a lot of our time early on in the life of our business.

The truth was that we felt desperate. After countless hours of work, we launched our online store but didn’t have the customers to justify our efforts. Our website was a ghost town and we practically jumped on every customer that came through our virtual doors.

Photo by Stoo Hopwood

As a result, we went out of our way to do special requests for anyone that asked even if it had no long term value for the business.

The quick cash was like a drug. Seeing money come in validated our store’s existence and we let our fear of missing out on potential business turn us into virtual doormats. Back then, we didn’t value our time and it took a few bad customer situations to that help us realize our true worth.

The Wealthy Customer

I very clearly remember our first large potential customer. Her name was Anita and she was helping her daughter plan her wedding which was to take place the following year. I remember speaking with her on the phone for the first time and getting the impression that she was extremely wealthy. I also received a vibe that she wanted her daughter’s wedding to be extra special no matter what the cost. That last part made me salivate.

I remember Anita found us on the web by clicking on our adwords link and wanted to order personalized wedding handkerchiefs for her daughter’s wedding invitations. She had this vision of embroidering the guest’s name on a lace handkerchief and wrapping a paper invitation inside. Quite a novel idea actually and all told we were looking at a deal worth well over $2500 in revenue which easily would have been our largest single order to date.

The problem was that Anita was not satisfied with any of the embroidering options that we had in place at the time. She wanted something very specific to be stitched onto each handkerchief and she wanted to see what it would look like before placing her order.

After getting a rough outline of what she wanted, my wife and I were comfortable with her request and we agreed to help her out. After all, Anita seemed like a very pleasant lady and easy to work with as well. We would work out the details later.

The Result
While Anita was extremely nice, she had no clue what she really wanted. Even though we made samples for her and even put up webpages with detailed photos of the handkerchiefs, she never seemed satisfied. She would tweak things slightly this way, or move the text around. And each iteration would take us several hours to implement.

In fact, we spent several weeks trying to refine the embroidered design to her specifications and she was clearly getting frustrated and so were we. Meanwhile, my wife and I had completely dropped the rest of our business on the floor for this lady. Our original vision of our online store was one of complete automation. Orders were supposed to fly in from the internet and we would just have to fulfill them. Working with Anita on her wedding project just took too much of our time.

Ultimately, we decided to call it quits. The aftermath? One month wasted and no money to show for it.

The Special Order

One of the main strategies that my wife and I had early on with our business was to specifically go after wedding planners. The idea was that if we could get a bunch of wedding planners on board that we could sustain a steady stream of referral business over the long haul. So we were always on our best behavior whenever any sort of event planner contacted us over the phone..

This particular wedding planner wanted to order 50 dozen of our rose embroidered napkins for a last minute reception. But the problem was that it was one of our least popular napkin styles and we didn’t have enough in stock to fulfill her order. The other problem was that she needed the napkins in under 2 weeks.

Since our vendors are from overseas and our products are made to order, we had to pay extra for expedited manufacturing and air delivery. Normally, we would never have placed such an order without collateral, but the wedding planner assured us that she was definitely going to buy from us and just needed the final okay from her customer.

The timeframe was so tight that we decided to place the order with our manufacturer even before the final approval was met. After all, thousands of dollars were at stake.

The Result
The wedding planner was true to her word. She did receive approval from her customer and she did place the order. However, the order was far less than she had initially specified. Turns out her customer decided to reduce their budget and slashed their guest list by over a half. We ended up only making 40% of what we thought we were going to make and we were stuck with dozens of our worst selling napkin styles.

Special Delivery

Perhaps we’re just softies but my wife and I tend to be very sympathetic towards desperate brides. Whenever we get calls from customers on the verge of tears over something wedding related, we are much more inclined to listen and go out of our way to help them out.

Occasionally, we’ll receive orders from customers who live only 10-15 minutes minutes away. This one particular customer placed an order online and then called us begging for permission to pick up her wedding linens in person for her wedding the following day.

One of our policies is that we don’t allow customers to visit our storage facility. We don’t have a physical storefront so we are not comfortable handling customer visits directly. We either ship our orders or we turn the customer away.

Honestly, I have no idea what came over us that day. Perhaps it was because we were desperate for business. Perhaps it was because this bride wanted to order a large quantity of linens. Perhaps it was because she cried over the phone. In any case, we decided to deliver the linens to her rather than have her come to pick them up.

The Result
In her haste, the bride gave us an incorrect address which caused my wife and I to go on this wild goose chase to deliver her order. While her residence was only supposed to be 10 minutes away, we could not find her house nor could we contact her by phone either. She simply wasn’t picking up her cell.

So my wife and I ended up expending a lot of energy trying to track down her real address over the internet. We used every means possible. We searched for her on Google. We tried looking for her fiance by combing the wedding registries. When we finally found her, we had effectively wasted our entire day.

What’s The Point Of All This?

After going through many more situations like the ones described above, my wife and I gradually learned to say no. Learning to say no was an important word to learn because it will allowed us to focus on growing our business the way we wanted it to grow. These days, my wife and I use the following rules of thumb when it comes to one off projects.

• Does the nature of the work provide long term value to the business? Can the work be leveraged towards content or new products for the store?
• Is the money involved justify our personal time and effort? Are we paying ourselves enough?
• Is the income scalable? Can we afford to take on many of these projects without killing ourselves first?

Take it from a former “yes” man. Saying “no” is an underrated skill and can be one of the most valuable words in your vocabulary. One thing we often neglect is the value of our own time. The sooner we realize our true worth, the sooner we can focus our efforts on what truly matters.